According Damien Triolet, a known and respected GPU reviewer (who, as you might remember, helped to unravel the secrets in GTX 970 memory allocation problem), ASUS and MSI are sending cards with modified BIOSes to the press. Such software enables more power on review samples, which leads to increased frequencies and better results overall.

Damien reports that those ‘optimized’ BIOSes are a very common problem in GPU industry. Manufacturers often encourage GPU reviewers to enable special overclocking presets before attempting to review those cards. Luckily, with little success.

The alternative is to supply optimized BIOSes to the press, so such settings are enabled by default. This usually means a gain of few MHz. Something that you won’t get on retail sample.

For such reason Damien asks manufacturers to supply retail BIOSes for his tests. Obviously manufactures are not eager to supply such software. The problem was discovered with MSI GTX 1080 GAMING X and ASUS GTX 1070 STRIX, so might want to take reviews of those cards with a grain of salt. Gigabyte on the other hand does not use such practices with its G1 GAMING Series.

Yeah, I hardware manufacturers 'cooking' the books on performance - 10s shocked. It just a heads up, for those comparing different manufacture's cards, that a few frame per second faster doesn't mean anything. As usual, price, warranty and reliability matter the most.

I remember 10+ years ago NV was caught optimizing their cards for 3DMark, what a scandal that was. I remember buying my STRIX 980 Ti, it was advertised everywhere that it did 1317 base clock which was above the competition. Well that is the OC mode boost clock. The actual Normal mode base clock is 1190 and Normal mode boost clock is actually 1291.

The LED's, physical size, and power decrease of the STRIX 1080 have me liking it a lot but the stories of temps and no OCing ability has me staying away.

Also, I do not trust brand new memory. Memory always has a long maturity period. I think this brand new spanking GDDR5X is part of the blame for no OCing and high temps. I would much rather have the GDDR5 on the GTX 1070 that is over 5 years old and very mature. Heck they have even quite cooling GDDR5, no heatsinks on my STRIX.

Well, if true, the practice of sending especially developed product samples to reviewers in order to elicit favourable outcomes in the reviews that dont actually match the retail product performance is reprehensible, potentially fraud and would be a bad practice in my view.

Will be very interesting to see how this plays out in the tech website community.

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Well, like others have commented, tech companies have been doing this for years on mobos, ssd, GFX cards, etc. So, only a few tech sites looking for attention will actually report on this. The others don't want to spend their relationships with vendors on these kind of stories. It's just worth keeping in mind when one buys - you may not actually get exactly what was in the review or is advertised by vendors - probably small print somewhere that says "specs subject to change"